Lost in Between
by night time musings
Summary: AU. A different take on the final book and afterwards. Hope to pick up as I go along.  My first HP fanfic & I'm not very good at summaries...so, you know.
1. Chapter 1

Lost in Between

Standing and waiting for a stranger's help is one of the hardest jobs in the world. With your fate in someone else's hands, a person with no attachment to you except as a fellow human being and no reason to take time out of his day – just belief in your cause, your patience and faith in yourself may just be the only thing that keeps you sane – but then you crossed that line ages ago. As the world moves around you, you are stuck in a rut – to afraid to move, not strong enough to stand still. You are tied down by the gravity of your situation and frozen by the vastness of your task. After all time is money and you have just discovered your worth.

You face hatred, anger, ridicule, indifference, and hidden sympathy as you inch closer and closer to loss of faith – but then again you banished yourself. The deeper you go down the rabbit hole, the further that light at the end of the tunnel seems to disappear. Lost, fatigued and embattled your jump over the chasm of insanity is all but complete – this is war and you are three seventeen year olds playing at being soldiers.

In your last throw of the dice, you glance one last look through the tunnel and this time in the distance you see this one person stretching their hand towards you – congratu bloody lations out of nowhere you have found your very own Cheshire cat. With a maniacal grin stretched across his face and filled with cryptic references and hidden words of advice he offers to be your guide in this faithless world. And you lost, tired and embattled have no option but to take that hand, close your eyes and disappear – After all blind faith is something you have always been good at and RAB did survive the destruction of two horcruxes.

Following advice is never easy. Yet it forces you to do instead of just be. It gets you moving again, lighting fires along the way. From darkness you move to light, whatever little you manage to scrounge, as you feel hope licking at your edges. The initial wave of surprise is a welcome feeling further accentuated by the fact that you are on a path going somewhere – After all you were told to destroy seven impossible things before breakfast and you are finally getting started.

As you start ticking of points in your checklist, the light glows brighter trying to blind you with it's intensity, switching tactics at will to make you forget. In this hustle and rush your mind glosses over details as important facts slip through the gap and before you know it you have forgotten the one thing that matters – your Cheshire cat. Even the brains of your little group of three, a much much cosier number than seven, seems to feel the pressure of living life in limbo as her mind starts to go blank.

Manic grin in face it laughs at your stupidity, silently cackling as it manipulates your hurtling in the direction it wishes to choose – the subtle changes lost to you in the darkness. The puppet master after all prefers to work in the background, the darkness his shield and words his weapons.

Before you know it, you catch up with light, bursting out in the open, glowing with righteousness, ready to take on the world – after all the parts are dead only the body remains. As your eyes adjust to the light you realise with a sinking feeling that you are miles from your destination and the momentary hope that this is a good thing is quashed by the one simple fact that your friend , mentor and cat is standing on the other side, the grin in place – wider and more maniacal. And that's when you start to scream.


	2. Important Pauses

Authors note: A comment/review telling me whether i should continue would be nice. Pretty pretty please, with a bow on top?

The one plus point of screaming is that it blanks out your mind – even the most brilliant ones stop ticking for just that moment. In that split second, when everybody's frozen – in shock or triumph, plans begin to form and with your life at stake each is weighed on merit.

But the moment breaks and before you can say a word, you're shifting. As you move, from thinking to doing, your reflexes take over. Honed since what was an eventful youth, you start moving as a team – treading the same paths in a dance known and perfected by you over time – dazzling in its intensity, deadly in its intent. One wrong step can signify death but then again you've known that for a while.

The only thing that seems to be working in your favour is the confusion caused by the numbers against you, the chaos your friend and disorientation your weapon. This of course, is augmented by the fact that your enemies fight in fear, not with belief.

Within this battle yet another battle seems to be developing. One that has almost been an eternity in the making, with a new participant due to the betrayal - One can almost envision a commentator providing a subtext to the fight. The electric atmosphere has been set alight in a sickening shade of green. As this dance reaches its crescendo it stops, not crashing like the wave expected but like a bubble slowly expanding, encompassing all in its wake, drowning out the screams, the shouts and the never ending cries. With the Order now present too, it's like a pandemonium minus the noise. At the epicentre stand five people – three souls lost between a childhood they never had and a future they could never envision, one Cheshire cat who turned out to be fox, and one who even by a long stretch could never be classified as human.

3 vs. 2. A trio vs a dichotomy of betrayal and evil, and yet oddly enough it is us that feels outnumbered. After all what hope do the three of us, barely out of school (minus the last year on top) have against a charlatan and a man who devoted his life to the study of the dark arts? Even as the imposter takes a back step, on the command of his master, we feel our disadvantage increase.

It would be a farce to say the battle is epic; the prelude more worthy of the title, but the importance... the importance can never be stressed enough. What it is though is quick, scrappy and oddly silent. In a pattern that has become slightly familiar, it turns out to be two spells followed by four, all being the same – a call for death. The first two shouts, one from either side lead to a tenous link being formed between wands forged before this story started. Almost like two lost brothers meeting on and off again both in loss and pain finally deciding to put a rest to their sad story.

The link prevails for a second, before it is broken by the caster more afraid of its consequences – the memory of the same event seared in his (it's?) brain. Immediately four voices in the same moment cry out two words – avada kedavra, as the spectators pray on the outcome. Directed by the centre, enhance by the sides, the three outweigh the one letting the brilliant white drown out the sickly green. The totem falters, wobbles and topples over. The wolves circling around, waiting for the carcasses fall to their knees clutching their arms in pain – lambs led to a slaughter far from the wolves they perceived themselves to be, as the defenders are reborn as the righteous phoenixes they believed themselves to be.

As more people start popping in, and those who still can start popping out life seems to slowdown to a standstill. Finally there is proof that the war is over and the pain and sacrifice has been worth it.

As everybody looks for their so called 'saviours', a few more practical start rounding up the evil that remains. The 'Golden Trio', now greater heroes then they ever wished to be, lie in the centre – unconscious, troubled and scared. Their faces are haunted by dreams of horrors known only to them. What is truly heartbreaking is the fact that even in certain death they have tried to protect each other if not with spells then with their own bodies, each doing their best to be the one in front. The triangle made by their bodies seems predestined by fate and laid out by her helpers.

Not a moment is wasted as all three are immediately sprinted away to the hospital. What follows is a controlled frenzy and agonising wait, separated by thin doors that feel reprehensible in their job. On the one side there is no time to think as you do what years of training have taught you, using all your experience and letting your reflexes take over, as you treat arguably the three most important patients of your lifetime. On the other side, in a room weighed by tension, layered with stress and coloured with uncertainty people just sit, taking what comfort they can from their little rituals.

It takes the healers five hours to stabilize their patients and treat them for the various physical and magical maladies they can pinpoint, their spells hampered by the amount of darkness surrounding the three. The scars that crisscross the bodies will fade in time, maybe even disappear, and yet they pale in comparison to the mental scars the patients will have to overcome. When the healers can complete what little they can do, they go out to face the inquest.

The doctors coming out seem to spur the occupants into action. Questions are thrown from every direction as they all crowd the new occupants of the room, hungry for news of any kind. However the only concrete answer that can be given is, "what can be identified has been treated and further treatment can only take place after the patients awake. The only problem seems to be the fact that the patients do not wish to awaken."

As looks are thrown around the room, the only though in everybody's mind is the fact that who would dare blame them?


End file.
